June meeting – updated

Vivox is a Framingham-based company that focuses on providing tools for in-game communications in online worlds and virtual communities. They will be sponsoring Post Mortem this month, and they’ll be giving away a bunch of goodies, including clothing and headsets. Please be sure to thank them for their support of Post Mortem!

And as long as we’re talking about online worlds and virtual communities, the speaker this month will be Darius Kazemi, who has recently founded Orbus Gameworks, which provides tools for analysis…heck, I’ll let him tell you:

When designing and maintaining an MMO, developers are faced with a litany of questions. Do mages level faster than fighters? What vehicles are being neglected? Which players are hubs of our social networks? What areas are densely populated? How can we detect gold farmers?

These questions are often answered with intuition – and these answers often introduce assumptions that, while intuitive, are also dead wrong. Data metrics can provide a wealth of quantitative information about player behavior, provided that there is a solid technical backbone and that an appropriate methodology is followed.

This session will cover examples of how data metrics can crush commonly-held assumptions about player behavior and give designers a new perspective on how their virtual worlds really work. Darius will show how to ask the right questions of your game so you can get the most out of a metrics system, covering basic census information, combat metrics, macro- and microeconomics, and social network visualization.